Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever by Ann Cleeves Read Free Book Online Page A

me.”
    George wondered that anyone could be so unmoved by the beauty of the bird, by the excitement of discovery, and heard the man move clumsily away.
    The bird flew back to feed on the chum, and the boat continued to circle it. As the Jessie Ellen moved slowly through the water, they saw the petrel in different lights from different angles. Rob took photograph after photograph.
    “It’s quite different from anything else I’ve ever seen,” George said. “Really, I don’t think there can be any mistake.”
    At last they were able to relax. They felt they knew the bird and would always remember it. It was almost as if they owned it. Rob put down the camera, lay back on the deck, and stretched.
    “Where’s Greg?” he asked. “ If he doesn’t get here soon, he’ll miss it.” Without moving from his place in the sun, he turned his head and shouted. “Duncan! Where’s Greg?”
    The older man walked back along the deck towards them. He seemed helpless, rather ashamed, like a child who has failed to perform a simple task.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t find him. You’ll have to help.”
    “What do you mean, you can’t find him?” Rob was beyond himself after the new bird, superior, derisive.
    “He’s not on deck where he went to sleep,” Duncan said, “and he’s not in his bunk. I don’t know where else to look.”
    “He’ll be here somewhere,” Rob said at his most irritatingly flippant. “On the last trip I did, Keith Vinicombe fell asleep in a lifeboat, and we thought we’d lost him overboard.”
    He stretched again.
    Molly and George helped Duncan James to look for Greg. At first it was a chore, and they thought it would soon be over. They searched the boat from end to end, growing more bewildered and disturbed as they failed to find any sign of Greg Franks. It was as if he had never existed. His clothes, his bag, his binoculars, and the telescope had all disappeared. As he was rooting fruitlessly through a storage space in the bulkhead, George remembered suddenly a nightmare which had recurred when his first son was a baby. He dreamed he had taken the boy in his pram into a strange and busy town, then left him on a street corner and forgotten about him. Later, when he returned in panic to look for the pram, all sign of it and the baby had gone, and he ran helplessly round the streets in a futile search. The search for Greg Franks had the same nightmare quality. Finally they called the others to help them, and they chased round the boat in a frenzy, calling Greg’s name, angry because they felt he must be playing some elaborate practical joke.
    Rose Pengelly found Greg, and she had stopped looking for him. Throughout the search she was calmer than the others. She searched the cabins carefully but without their panic. Then Matilda, who had been sleeping in a carrycot in the saloon, woke up, and Rose said she would have to attend to her. She would need changing. She would be hungry. She took the baby to the deck at the stern of the boat. It was midafternoon, and that was the only part of the boat still in sunlight. Louis was already steering the boat back towards land. She put a rug on the deck and sat there, feeding the baby, quite content it seemed, despite the disappearance of the young man, quite self-contained.
    When she screamed, Louis got to her first. He could not tell what was wrong with her. Her mouth was open with horror, but she could not speak. He could see nothing out of order. The baby was still feeding with muffled murmurs of delight. The rubby dubby bag, now almost empty, still attracted a stream of petrels and gulls.
    Rose pointed to the rubby dubby bag.
    “Look,” she said at last.
    Louis reluctantly left her. By now the others were coming from below in response to her scream. He stood at the stern rail and looked down at the bag. Something had become entangled with the rope, and as the floating bag bounced over the waves, so did the piece of flotsam. He saw a shoe